In America's Gulf Coast region, where grounded oil tankers are being broken down for parts, Nailer, a teenage boy, works the light crew, scavenging for copper wiring just to make quota - and hopefully live to see another day. But when, by luck or chance, he discovers an exquisite clipper ship beached during a recent hurricane, Nailer faces the most important decision of his life: Strip the ship for all it's worth or rescue its lone survivor, a beautiful and wealthy girl who could lead him to a better life.

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Audible Editor Reviews

Nebula Award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi has made a name for himself writing stories set in a bleak near-future following an environmental collapse. A more timely novel could not exist than his latest, Ship Breaker, his first Young Adult offering and possibly his strongest work to date. Narrator Joshua Swanson brings precisely the young, street-wise performance needed to carry this story.

Nailer Lopez is fighting to survive in a devastated world, doing the only work a boy on the verge of manhood can do  "light crew" duty as a ship breaker, salvaging copper wire from the rusting hulks of tankers left wrecked on America's Gulf Coast. Every day is a struggle to make quota and find the best salvage to stay in the good graces of his crew. There is always the hope of the big score: a pocket of petroleum, precious fuel in an age of exhausted wells, drowned cities, and risen seas, where any energy source is precious.

When Nailer and his best friend Pima come across the find of a lifetime, a salvage that could buy him freedom not just from the brutality of light crew but from his abusive father as well, there's only one problem  it comes with a swank, a rich girl named Nita. Nita has value just like everything else, and Nailer is faced with a choice: keep her ship and buy his independence, or he can go the far more dangerous  but possibly more profitable  route and help her. Nailer, Pima, and the identity of newly nick-named "Lucky Girl" are always on the edge of discovery by Nailer's drug-addicted father, his crew, and the genetically augmented "half-man", Tool.

Joshua Swanson was well cast. His style is wholly appropriate to a dystopia, and he is completely convincing as he takes us through Nailer's dilemmas and perils. This is a fast-paced story of adventure and suspense, and Swanson's narration  while careful and precise  carries the tension well. He skillfully handles the voicing of the story's main female characters, Pima and Nita, without slipping into the narrative pitfalls of falsettos or needless breathiness. Bacigalupi's cast is vast and varied, but Swanson manages to keep the listener oriented through adept pitch and passable island dialects here and there.

This is a performance that draws the listener into the dark recesses of a rusted and starving world. Though marketed as Young Adult, there is plenty here for any lover of near-future dystopian literature to enjoy. Christie Yant

Publisher's Summary

In America's Gulf Coast region, where grounded oil tankers are being broken down for parts, Nailer, a teenage boy, works the light crew, scavenging for copper wiring just to make quota - and hopefully live to see another day. But when, by luck or chance, he discovers an exquisite clipper ship beached during a recent hurricane, Nailer faces the most important decision of his life: Strip the ship for all it's worth or rescue its lone survivor, a beautiful and wealthy girl who could lead him to a better life.

In this powerful novel, award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi delivers a thrilling, fast-paced adventure set in a vivid and raw, uncertain future.

What the Critics Say

AudioFile Earphones Award Winner

"Narrator Joshua Swanson makes this harsh dystopian world all too believable. He adjusts the pacing to fit the intensity of the action and gives each character a voice that fits his or her personality. This is superb listening for teens—and adults too—even those who aren’t big fans of science fiction." (AudioFile)

Paolo Bacigalupi is destined to be one of the Grand Old Masters of science fiction in another couple of decades. His books are uniformly excellent and capture perfectly the aesthetic of modern SF. His pet theme is environmental and economic catastrophe creating an impoverished, post-oil world. Ship Breaker reads very much like a YA version of his Hugo and Nebula-winning The Windup Girl. Although it's never explicitly stated that Ship Breaker takes place in the same world, it is similar enough that it very well could.

The main character, Nailer, is a ship breaker, a teenager who lives his life crawling around in old vessels trying to salvage anything that will earn a little coin. It's a dirty, dangerous job, yet he considers himself lucky to have it, because the alternative is worse. The dystopian element is not an oppressive government, but a nonexistent government, in a world of drowned cities.

When a storm washes an expensive ship and a pretty girl ashore, Nailer and his friends have to decide whether to help the girl or strip her ship (and her) for parts. Obviously we know which way Nailer must choose for the story to go further. The rich girl turns out to have been fleeing from enemies of her wealthy and powerful family, and so Nailer is dragged along on an adventure that will take him far beyond any horizons he'd previously imagined.

You can tell this is a YA novel by the fact that Bacigalupi tones down the violence a little (but there are still some pretty gruesome deaths), and sex is only implied. The story is kept fast-paced and adventurous, with Nailer going from one close call to another. I'd compare Ship Breaker favorably to one of Heinlein's juveniles; its science and worldbuilding is (of course) more contemporary, but the story is very much a boy's adventure, with a pretty girl (who has plenty of will of her own) as a motivating factor.

Highly recommended: if you liked The Windup Girl, you should like this somewhat lighter story told in a similar vein, and it's better than a lot of adult SF.

On it's own, this is a likable book. The characters in Ship Breaker are fine and appropriately likable/hatable, but Bacigalupi has engaged me more deeply with less time and words in previous work. Also, I'm not a YA reader, for whom this book is intended. There are elements here reminiscent of RLS' Treasure Island (without being derivative), but I picked this up because I wanted to know more about the world I saw in The WindUp Girl. There's too little of that here for me, but if you liked Bacigalupi's The Alchemist, I think you'll be happy with Ship Breaker.

I read WindUp Girl less than a month ago, and then proceeded to DEVOUR everything else published by the author over the last few weeks. I read that Ship Breaker was set in the same dystopian future of WindUp Girl and wanted more of that. If you too are looking for more of that, you're better off reading and re-reading Bacigalupi's short story collection Pump Six. Indeed, shorts like 'Pop Squad', 'The People of Sand and Slag' and 'Pump Six' will stick with me longer than anything in Ship Breaker.

Still, I do leave this book thinking more about its big theme –the ties that bind people together– into families (genetic and impromptu), gangs, corporations, and the nature of loyalty, and what we do with all those things when everything else breaks down.

I'm sad there's no more Bacigalupi to devour at the moment, but interested in reading something like Cormac McCarthy's The Road that may give me what I'm looking for.

* NOTE - While I'm used to Jonathan Davis reading Bacigalupi, Joshua Swanson does a great job handling the voices of men, women, children, and even dog-men.

The scary part of this book is that the dystopian world is not that hard to imagine. Bacigalupi has drawn on all kinds of contemporary problems and followed them through to create a disturbing picture of life in the future. I've seen footage of children working as ship breakers in Bangladesh; it is not a pretty picture. This is a dark tale; on the other hand, the conditions of poverty, violence, scarcity of resources and drug abuse give rise to some interesting moral questions which the author explores in a compelling manner. The narration was okay, but not my favorite. I didn't find his Caribbean accent convincing and with a couple of the central characters having that accent, it was at times a little irritating. He was otherwise good.

Definitely. In this book, as in his book "The Windup Girl", the author has a very interesting take on the future...one that is believable and not out of the realm of possibility (for the most part).

Who was your favorite character and why?

The half-man Tool. I really liked this character because he was hard-edged on the one hand, but also was intelligent and trying to break out of the stereotypical role of his people in society.

Any additional comments?

This is the first book I've heard Joshua Swanson read and I thought he did a superb job. As we all know, the narrator can make or break an audiobook and Swanson definitely made this one with his outstanding voices and style of reading.

I loved Bacigalupi???s The Windup Girl, but found Ship Breaker disappointing. Yes! It has a vivid global warming dystopia future setting: the Gulf Coast and its submerged cities, giant hurricanes, and abandoned, derelict oil tankers being scavenged by the exploited poor for sale of the useful components like copper and oil to the rich trading companies whose technologically advanced clipper ships cruise over the seas at high speeds. Yes! It has an intelligent, brave, ethical, and sensitive teenaged protagonist, Nailer, AKA ???Lucky Boy,??? yearning to escape his scavenging life dominated by his violent, drug addicted nightmare of a father for the unattainable dream of sailing off on those pristine clipper ships. Yes! It has a spunky ???swank??? rich girl company princess damsel in distress love interest for Nailer, Nita, AKA ???Lucky Girl.??? Yes! It has good young adult themes: people may transcend their genes, environment, and training; family members are defined not by blood but by the degree to which they ???have each other???s back???; if we don???t shape up eco-wise, we???re going to wake up one morning in an environmental disaster of a dystopia; sometimes you have to break free from your parents in order to find your own identity and place in the world. Yes! There are plenty of page-turning suspenseful violent action scenes. And yet???

Maybe there was too much action. Maybe I was expecting a deliciously ambiguous ending (as in The Windup Girl). Maybe I???d have liked denser world-building (as in The Windup Girl). Maybe I thought that the ???half-men??? humans augmented with animal DNA should have been developed more deeply or left out completely. Maybe I got tired of Bacigalupi writing ???pain blossomed in Nailer???s shoulder/foot/head.??? Maybe too many lines sounded stilted or hokey (not the fault of Joshua Swanson, who does a fine job reading the book).

Ship Breaker is, then, a good but not great novel that I do not regret listening to but do not need to listen to again.

I enjoyed Bacigalupi's "adult" novel, The Windup Girl, but felt that its convoluted plot and lack of easily sympathetic characters made it hard to recommend outside speculative fiction fan circles.

Shipbreaker, however, a young adult novel set in a vividly grimy, frightening future, trades some intellectual complexity for a more accessible, visceral reading experience. Though apocalyptic fiction seems to be all the rage now, even in YA, this book is certainly near the top of the class. From its relatable characters to its convincing scenes of action and danger to its sense of a complex, lived-in world, Shipbreaker offers plenty that will genuinely speak to adolescent readers (though the uncompromising violence, scary adult characters, and modest amount of profanity might be a little too much for children) and grown-up ones, too. Of course, there are "messages" here, as well, in Bacigalupi's vision of a world environmentally and economically decimated by capitalism run amok, but he presents them in a smart, unobtrusive way, without talking down to his audience.

Totally recommended, and a book that puts Bacigalupi into the "young speculative fiction writers with something to say" category. Compared to the Windup Girl, this novel is a bit more conventionally plotted, but perhaps a better intro to Bacigalupi. If his vision draws you in, that book offers a richer experience.

I bought this one through the paperback sale, and I am glad I did. This is a dystopian novel, set in what seems to be New Orleans post a massive hurricane that has left it beyond repair or rather people no longer wanted to restore a place that would just be storm ridden again in the future, a lost cause. The only inhabitants live off of scavenging ships that have been left behind after the "city-killer" storms. The author reminds me of James Dashner, if you enjoyed Maze Runner, you will enjoy this!

Bacigalupi invents a colorful and detailed future where human and quasi-human toil to survive. Grim but not without hope. The story takes place in a tropical and swampy South Coast and follows the struggle of two teenagers to escape their enemies and survive in a relentless world. The two protagonists come from very different background and yet learn to be with each other. The scenario and story show great inventiveness. Well written and read.

I like taking a gamble with unfamiliar authors and genres. This was a success. I liked the character development, the way the story flowed, the description of how the setting of the book came about and how the characters existed in their society. You could believe that such a scenario could come to take place. I enjoyed every word and have purchased two further books by Bacigalupi; and have not been disappointed by the one I have finished reading. Although this second book is set in the same future world, the style of writing is not repetitious - I sometimes find some authors write too close to a particular format but here the style of the author is not compromised. I enjoyed the book and I hope you do too.

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